Calculate Anything, Everywhere

Welcome To Stupid Ideas 101

Color me jaded. My Apple experience dates back to the last century, to a very used and rather anemic PowerBook 100 with a 40MB hard disk drive and a black and white display. I love useful products that are well designed. I loved that Mac.

Yet, relative to Apple’s product line today, that PowerBook 100 might as well have been crank operated. That’s a stupid idea, right? Well, it’s no more stupid than Apple putting iMessage on Android and Windows. It’s no more stupid than a reverse notch on the Mac.

Reverse notch?

You know, it’s not as if we’ve had many slow news days this year, what with APPL’s stock market turmoil (I segregate Apple Inc. from APPL the stock because they are not the same thing), continued shenanigans emanating from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, yet technology websites can come up with some crazy ideas to engage their readers.

After all, in the technology website business, engaging eyeballs means more advertising dollars, and stupid is just as engaging as insightful analysis. Well, no. Not really. Sorry. My bad. I got carried away.

That bump on the top of the notebook is called a reverse notch. Ostensibly, it would house Apple’s famous Face ID technology when it finally arrives on the Mac.

Cool, right? No.

It can only be a matter of time before Apple adds Face ID to MacBooks, but the question is: what approach should the company take?

No.

There is no question to settle.

Whenever Apple gets around to putting Face ID on the Mac it will be where you expect it to be and where the FaceTime HD cameras are now. Some might think that Apple applied two different solutions; one to the new iPad Pro models, and one to iPhone X, Xs, and Xs Max.

Wrong. Other than the iPhone’s Notch, they are the same thing.

Apple could just as easily kept the forehead onto new iPhones with Face ID, sans Notch, and almost everyone would have been happy. The Notch comes with extra space on the side– ears, as they’re called; or horns– which displays Wi-Fi, battery power, and other useful icons. Those still exist on the new iPad Pros, but sans any notch.

For iPhones, Apple opted for super-slim bezels and a notch to house the TrueDepth cameras and other sensors. For the iPad, the company instead chose to keep the bezels thick enough to house the module.

See?

So, which of the two will Apple choose for the Mac? The iPad Pro model. Duh. No Notch. Read my lips. No Notch.

How far should Apple go once it adds Face ID tech to MacBooks? Should it stick to the sort of bezel size seen in the latest iPad Pro models, or should it go as slim as possible and adopt the kind of ‘reverse notch’ seen on the ZenBook 13?

Yeah, display bezels are getting thinner but it is likely there is a limit to how thin they can get and design esthetics may dictate that a protruding reverse notch is a bridge too far.

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